Stève Sainlaude. France and the American Civil War: A Diplomatic History. Translated by Jessica Edwards. Foreword by Don H. Doyle.

Extract

Stève Sainlaude has written an important book that anyone interested in the foreign relations of the American Civil War era must read and ponder. France and the American Civil War: A Diplomatic History is impressively researched in informative and under-utilized sources, resolutely analytical, forcefully argued, and lucidly written. By probing the motives, objectives, and actions of Emperor Napoleon III and his government, Sainlaude illuminates the process by which French foreign policies were formulated and implemented and explains why France remained neutral and chose not to intervene in the epic North American conflict.

Sainlaude contends that French foreign policies were ultimately derived from a realistic assessment of the nation’s interests rather than from “sympathy” for either the United States or the Confederacy (98). Ironically, Napoleon often based his foreign policies on “fanciful ideas—if not daydreams” (5). The emperor’s tendency to favor the South over the North ostensibly aligned with his “Grand Design” to promote monarchy versus representative government, to advance Catholicism and a “Latin bloc” over “Anglo-Saxon Protestantism,” and to prevent further U.S. territorial expansion into Mexico and the Caribbean Basin (110–111). To further these objectives, he intervened militarily in Mexico in 1861 and subsequently imposed Maximilian of Habsburg, an Austrian prince, as the emperor of Mexico. Accepting at face value the Confederacy’s renunciation of its pre–Civil War expansionist tendencies, Napoleon viewed southern independence and a weakened United States as crucial to the success of his Mexican project. However, by 1865, the Grand Design proved to be a classic example of unrealistic foreign policy overreach. Before this became clear, Napoleon persistently favored French diplomatic recognition of the South, repeatedly sought to mediate the American conflict on southern terms, encouraged the South to build a navy in France, and even considered the use of force to break the North’s naval blockade of the Confederate coast.